![]() I’ve been using these scripts for a few years, and so far the only time they break is if a new major version of an app (i.e. Then the rest of the process will continue as before. The next time the script is run after an app is updated, it will notice the new version using the app’s own update mechanism. One of the best parts of this system is that once it is setup, it should not need any more work. (This also means that large downloads which are interrupted before they are finished can be resumed by re-running the script.) No Maintenance (almost) Each di script is designed to check ~/Downloads/ to see if the latest version of the app is already downloaded there and ready to be installed. If you are behind a slow or metered Internet connection, or do you just not want to re-download each app update separately, you can easily sync your ~/Downloads/ folder using BitTorrent Sync. Have several Macs? You can run di scripts over ssh and update any Mac you want, without needing to worry about doing separate setup for each one. ![]() In almost all cases, you should be able to take one of these di scripts and run it on a freshly-installed Mac and it will download & install the latest version for you. I can check the Sparkle feed for the latest version of the app and compare it to the locally installed version using Unix tools which come standard with every Mac. Sparkle uses a standardized XML-based RSS feed that includes all of the information that I need to check to see if I have the latest version of an app, or a quick way to install the latest version of an app if it isn’t installed. Most third-party Mac apps use Sparkle to check for updates. I wanted something different than all of the above. But I still like my scripts better.)ĪutoPkg is a super-powerful system that can probably do far more than my system can. Cask is now part of Homebrew itself, and it appears they are trying to do app updates not just installs, so that’s definitely an improvement. That might make sense if an app doesn’t have its own update system, but for those that do, why not use them directly? (n.b. Cask solves the automation problem, in that you can schedule it to run whenever you want, but the whole system is built around the idea that someone else (other than you) will notice when an update to an app is available, and then submit it to the maintainers. Homebrew Cask does the same thing that Homebrew does, except for regular apps. (See Has MacUpdate fallen to the adware plague?) Every one of my scripts so far (and for the foreseeable future) downloads directly from the official website. Also: although I have been working on these scripts for a long time, and I still use MacUpdate, there was a very troubling “experiment” which seemed to happen recently where MacUpdate was bundling additional software with downloads and claiming it was a feature. Also, there’s no good way to tell it when to run, so it doesn’t solve the interruption problem. MacUpdate Desktop might be the easiest to use, but it’s $40/year, and seems to miss some apps that I use. MacUpdater seems like a better alternative to MacUpdate Desktop (one-time-fee versus subscription, and it seems to do better at finding apps which need to be updated). Yes, there are lots of other ways to do this: (Note: Technically these scripts do three things: Download, Install, and Update but I didn’t want to prefix them with dui and diu seemed awkward to type, so I went with a di prefix.) “But what about…?” That’s what these scripts allow you to do. Wouldn’t it be better if you could check for updates right after an app quits? Or check in the middle of the night or when your computer isn’t in use? Most apps have an update system, but they usually want to update at the least convenient time: right after you launch them, when you are trying to use them for something. dmg files, then copying them to /Applications/ (and un-mounting DMGs) zip files (or tbz files, etc) or mounting. Going to Google to find the appropriate website (not always easy because, especially if app has a common name, or if the search results have a lot of other download sites before the official site.)įinding the download link (not always easy)ĭownloading the app (easy, but sometimes slow, due to a slow server or slow Internet connection) ![]() However, there are a lot of good apps - maybe even the majority of good apps - which aren’t available in the Mac App Store. (For all of its problems, the Mac App Store does updates pretty well.) If you buy apps from the Mac App Store, then getting updates is fairly easy.
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